I just switched my laptop from PC-BSD 1.5.1.x to FreeBSD 7.0-Release and I noticed something odd.

I setenv PKGDIR to a safe spot and went about installing packages and ports through a shell script but, when it tried to install some apps via ports with PKGDIR set, they would barf pkg-descr not found style messages.

Doing it by hand using makes -i/-k switches things worked (but probably not smart), things also worked perfectly *normal* when the PKGDIR environment variable was not set when I went to install individual ports.

I found this kinda odd because I don't recall the ports(7) manual saying it honoured PKGDIR. However, /usr/ports/*.mk has a concept of ${PKGDIR}/pkg-* when looking for files such as pkg-descr, pkg-plist, and such.